Richard Truly, 86, deceased; Shuttle astronaut who went on to lead NASA

Richard Truly, a naval aviator and astronaut who flew aboard two early Space Shuttle missions and, as NASA administrator, led the agency’s return to space after the Challenger disaster, died Feb. 27 at his home in Genesee, Colorado . He was 86 years old. .

The cause was atypical Parkinson’s disease, according to his wife Colleen (Hanner) Truly.

Mr. Truly joined NASA in 1969, but didn’t venture into space for 12 years. when he was the pilot of the shuttle program’s second orbital flight. The success of that flight proved that NASA could safely relaunch the Columbia shuttle and return it safely to Earth seven months after its maiden flight.

But the mission, which was supposed to last five days, was cut to two days after one of the Columbia’s fuel cells failed. (That mission was separate from the 2003 Columbia disaster, long after Mr. Truly left NASA, which killed a crew of seven.)

In 1983, Mr. Truly, who was a captain at the time, commanded Challenger on its third flight, eighth overall in the shuttle program. It took off at night and landed in the dark – a first for the program. The flight also marked a personal distinction: Captain Truly was the first American grandfather in space.

Shortly thereafter, he retired from NASA to become the first commander of the Naval Space Command, which consolidated the Navy’s operations in space communications, navigation and surveillance.

But he returned to NASA in 1986 as associate administrator in charge of the shuttle program, less than a month after the Challenger disintegrated in 73 seconds during its flight, partly due to the launch at too low temperatures, killing the seven-man crew was killed. including a teacher, Christa McAuliffe.

A month into his new job, Captain Truly said that the next shuttle would launch only in daylight and warm weather (the Challenger launched at 36 degrees Fahrenheit), and that it would land in California instead of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“I don’t want you to think that this conservative approach, this safe approach, which I think is the right thing to do, is going to be a namby-pamby shuttle program,” he said. “Flying in space is a daring undertaking.”

He added: “We can’t print enough money to make it completely risk-free. But we’re certainly going to correct any mistakes we’ve made in the past, and we’re going to get it going again as quickly as possible under these guidelines.”

Captain Truly was also the chairman of the internal NASA task force that provided support to the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster. But his main task was to get the shuttle program flying again.

“He was widely recognized as having done an excellent job in that responsibility,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said in an email.

The job took 32 months: Discovery’s launch on a four-day mission in late September 1988 ended a long period of gloom and self-doubt for the agency.

“The nation,” said Mr. Truly, who was then a vice admiral, “will have the shuttle as the backbone of its space program well into the next century.”

Richard Harrison Truly was born on November 12, 1937 in Fayette, Miss. His father, James, was an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission. His mother, Jessie Smith (Sheehan) Truly, was a teacher. They divorced when Richard was young.

Mr. Truly didn’t grow up wanting to be an aviator; he remembered dreaming of driving a fire truck. “I never really intended to be a pilot,” he said in a NASA oral history in 2003. “It just never occurred to me that that would be a possibility.”

He studied engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship and became intrigued by aviation during two summers of Navy and Marine Corps indoctrination. After graduating in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, he trained as a naval aviator and was assigned to a fighter squadron.

Between 1960 and 1963 he made more than 300 landings, many at night, on the aircraft carriers Intrepid and Enterprise, after which he became a flight instructor.

In 1965, he was assigned to the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory, a Cold War surveillance program that planned to send astronauts into orbit in a modified Gemini capsule connected to a cylindrical, 50-foot-long laboratory . But the program was canceled in June 1969, and two months later Mr. Truly was one of seven astronauts from that program to join NASA.

He worked in capsule communications for the crewed Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions in the 1970s, then became a shuttle test pilot and backup pilot for the first shuttle mission in 1981.

He left NASA shortly after his second shuttle mission when John F. Lehman Jr., the Secretary of the Navy, asked him to take over the newly formed Naval Space Command in Dahlgren, Virginia. While there, he was promoted to vice admiral.

But after the Challenger tragedy, Mr. Lehman and the White House persuaded him to return to NASA. He recalled walking into his office on his first day as deputy administrator and finding people crying in the hallway “because of the media bashing they were getting,” he said in a 2012 interview. interview with the Colorado School of Mineswhere he was curator at the time.

“By then,” he added, “instead of a plane crash, it was portrayed as if NASA had killed its crew. It was the beginning of the most tumultuous technical, political, cultural and social undertaking I have ever been involved in.”

After three years as deputy administrator, Admiral Truly was appointed administrator by President George HW Bush, the space agency’s top position.

“This is the first time in its impressive history that NASA will be led by a hero of its own making, an astronaut who has been to space,” President Bush said at a news conference.

But Admiral Truly’s three years at the top of NASA were difficult ones. The agency had problems with launch delays, shuttles leaking fuel and the discovery of a defective mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope.

He was eventually forced to resign after clashing over NASA’s leadership with Vice President Dan Quayle and his staff at the National Space Council, of which Mr. Quayle was chairman.

Mr. Logsdon said that senior NASA employees, aerospace contractors and Congressional regulators had given positive assessments of Admiral Truly’s performance, but that his tenure was viewed negatively by “those reformers who believed that NASA needed fundamental change and concluded that Truly was not the person to lead that change.”

After leaving NASA in February 1992, Admiral Truly served as vice president and director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute, a nonprofit organization of Georgia Tech, and subsequently as director of the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He retired in 2005.

His awards included the Navy Distinguished Flying Cross, the Presidential Citizens Medal and two NASA Distinguished Service Medals.

In addition to his wife, Admiral Truly is survived by his daughter Lee Rumbles; his sons, Mike and Dan; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Admiral Truly admitted that he was sometimes afraid when he encountered danger and technical failures as a Navy pilot and astronaut.

“Fear is a beautiful, healthy phenomenon,” he once said. “Any pilot who says he has never been afraid is lying.”